Updated 1.0.5 Undocumented Changes
Yesterday we posted about the undocumented changes that came with 1.0.5 and after some feedback updated the post. Click the link here to see lots of graphical and mechanical additions. If you know of anything we've missed feel free to mention it in the comments.

Stay Awhile And Listen Sneak Peek
David Craddok, Author of the Blizzard history book Stay Awhile and Listen, has posted parts 1 and 2 from its 8th chapter on Shacknews. Included are dozens of interviews with the original Condor developers, including Max and Erich Schaefer, Dave and Peter Brevik, Eric Sexton and many others. You can find part 1 here and part 2 over here. Here are a few excerpts:

We all pile into the kitchen because it's the biggest space we have. People are sitting on the tables. Now we're going to make the decision on whether Diablo is turn-based or real-time. I would say probably 90 percent of the team wants it real-time. Dave doesn't. I don't. But pretty much everybody else wanted it real-time.

- Rick Seis, programmer, Condor

You couldn't just test out a little bit of code and run the program and see what happened. You really had to think about as many tasks as possible ahead of time. In that way you had to be a little more organized. You couldn't just change a line of code and re-run it.

Eh that's fair enough. I just wasn't aware that the news posts were actually performing such a level of calculations (or being given them by the player in question), and the correlation of a similarly shifted digit in both stories made me question. But no, you're entirely right - and it's kind of cool to see someone doing the math that should be in the game, but isn't... (ie. specific-ability DPS ala D2).

The math in game takes into account all stats except +damage to elites (demons, undead, etc) and +damage to skills. That gives us pretty good idea where our damage output is (except some known bugs with it). It could be better of course, for example, skill tooltips could easily show dps instead of the dps multiplicator, and tooptips could be more clear on skill mechanics. Game devs are funny people though, sometimes they want you to experiment, so in-game guides will never be totally clear.

But that's all the game can do for you. Tooltips can't predict how will you use skills with aoe or multiple hits. Azmodan has a big hitbox, so all bombs and granades will hit it. A small elite, like a skeleton will get only 1-2 hits from the same skills, thus dps on that elite will be around three times less. It makes no sense to take into account all uses of a skill... Many times devs can't even predict all uses of a skill. Discovering poverful mechanics like this is the fun part!